Review: The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Setting aside, for the moment at least, that this is the work of a Nazi and anti-Semite, I’m struck by the notion that Schmitt is part of what we might call the last wave of the major structuralists. That is, there’s a species of Modernism that begins with Marx and Freud (who posited clear structures to revolution and the psyche) through to Saussure (linguistics) and Levi-Strauss (anthropology) that deals with the dissolution of traditional notions of order by proposing specific and limited structures within which we live.

Schmitt follows in those footsteps, which makes one kind of sense of the 1932 first publication of this book, by insisting on a structure to the “political.” He distinguishes that from “politics,” and focuses on the condition of living in a culture where we are all subject to the ultimate power of the state. Only the state he insists, has the power to compel an individual to kill or be killed. As such, it carries a unique capacity for ordering Modern existence. He acknowledges other forms of what we have sometimes referred to as “tribalism,” other dimensions within and across states that we understand affiliations, but he insists the kill-or-be-killed power of the state gives it a status distinct from all others.

Beyond that, he sees a fundamental logic to the state. As a “political entity,” a state can either fail or survive. If it survives, it does so because it recognizes that all separate states are either “friends” or “enemies.” There is, for Schmitt, effectively no middle ground.

To his credit, that’s as clear as a structural argument can get. It reduces the world to a binary which is perfectly in keeping with the Fascist imagination. (Oops, I got that in a little before I intended.)

To his further credit, he explores that proposition in wide and subtle ways. He sees all “political” interactions – here, again, with “political” referring to the particular power of the state to compel its citizens to participate in war – as determined with an awareness of their fundamental existential stakes. Whatever else our political representatives may think they’re disputing with their potential friends and potential enemies, the defining limit is the willingness to go to war. Each potential trade deal, negotiation over boundaries, exchange of prisoners or treaty is ultimately backed by the implicit pledge that we will kill or be killed over it.

Such an analysis makes a different kind of sense of the 1932 publication date in that he was writing in the midst of the decline of the Weimar Republic with the specter of Hitler on the horizon. His Germany was suffering under the weight and humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, so it’s understandable that he’d see negotiated politics as such a black-and-white distinction. When the governments that defeated your father’s army continue to exact onerous penalties from you, even peace must feel something like war. Everyone not actively supporting you, that is, must needs appear as an enemy.

As I read this, I found myself pushing against both the fundamental structural premise – is it really so simple that everyone is either a friend or an enemy? (such thinking surely colored the U.S.’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam the rest of Southeast Asia) – and against the specific conclusion: can’t there be an understanding of the political that accommodates a different, transactional outcome beyond an implicit we-win/you-win dynamic?

To Schmitt’s further credit, he anticipates such a counter-argument. As he puts it in chapter 8, liberalism presents just such a claim, proposing that the danger of the state is over-reach. That is, according to liberalism, ultimate political authority resides in the individual and his or her rights. We should fear governments for “oppressing” us. Going back to his fundamental notion, though, he reasserts that a state that cannot ultimately compel its citizens to fight a war in its defense is, in the end, no state at all. Liberalism, he insists, fails on its own premises when it exists within a state that reserves for itself the central necessary act of its survival.

The response that came most enduringly to me as I read is the idea that there remains the possibility of a transactional relationship with other political entities, one that leaves them neither friend nor enemy but simply other. Must there always be a winner or loser in, say, a trade deal. Donald Trump says there must be; it’s the foundation of his foreign policy that trade can result only in a win or a loss. Schmitt says so as well, declaring, “In the past, the warring nations had subjugated the trading peoples; today it is the other way around” (76).

In at least one of Schmitt’s iterations of that claim, I see a glimmer of anti-Semitism, though I might not have looked for it without his reputation preceding him. As he puts it, “With such methods one could just as well the other way around define politics as the sphere of honest rivalry and economics as a world of deception” (77). Given the association of “devious Jews” with international commerce, I see Schmitt treading ground that Hitler would plant, that Hitler was just then seeding.

There’s no easy way to grapple with a thinker who’s so absolute and who, as the supporting material here from, among others Leo Strauss – himself a teacher and mentor to the neo-conservatives who under-girded the administration of George W. Bush – makes clear, stands at the foundation of an entire academic discourse.

That said, I know I stand with the liberals he dismisses as standing on philosophically tenuous ground. Granting him – just for the sake of argument – the premise that states confront one another with ever implicit existential stakes, I can’t help believing that contemporary nations have collectively come to understand the extent to which we threaten one another. We may no longer face the Mutually Assured Destruction of the late Cold War, but the simple truth is that we can do each other more good than harm. Neo-liberalism has its clear limits, and it shouldn’t have taken Trump to show them to us. That said, and acknowledging the many left behind as markets become increasingly global, it is possible for states to negotiate to their mutual benefit. That is, it’s possible to confront our neighbors neither as friends nor as enemies but simply as partners.

That may not be ideal, but it’s better than the dark alternative Schmitt proposes. He argues tightly that there’s no alternative, but he does from a fearful and straitened place himself. It’s not surprising that the same German despair that gave birth to Nazism would give birth to such an uncompromising conception of how we can live within the larger world.


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